


Mercy

by Mimnerme1860



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Attempted Suicide by Vigilante, Catholicism, Foggy Underestimates Matt's Catholicism, Foggy is a Reluctant Mobster, Gen, LOTS of Catholicism, Matt Murdock's Greatest Superpower is Catholicism, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 18:16:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4359305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mimnerme1860/pseuds/Mimnerme1860
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Foggy has a few secrets of his own that he’s kept from Matt for years. He thought he knew how Matt would react when he found out.</p><p>He had no idea.</p><p>Inspired by a prompt on the Daredevil Kink Meme.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mercy

It must have been twenty years since he last held a gun. 

The shape of the pistol was strange in his hand after so long; he had forgotten how small a gun was. But then, perhaps the difference in size was simply because his hand had finally grown into it.

His fingers went through the motions of cleaning and checking the gun by reflex, as though it had been only yesterday that Johnny had walked him through the motions. _Stop rushing. Wipe in the direction the bullet moves. For God’s sake, don’t forget to unload it first. Do you want to get yourself killed?_

An hour ago, he had let himself into the apartment with the key Matt had given him “for emergencies,” and he had since been turning over every aspect of what he would say—of what needed to be said. 

In retrospect, he should have known that he couldn’t run from the Family forever. After the virtual declaration of independence his withdrawal from the training grounds of Landman and Zack had represented, he had been so afraid of reprisal that he never walked alone, always kept one eye cast over his shoulder, slept with his bat within reach of the bed. Months passed, and he heard nothing. Graduation came and went without comment. No untoward messages had found him at the office.

Though his pride was hurt by the knowledge that his defection wasn’t worth even the mildest intervention, he supposed that being disowned was better than being disemboweled. 

Things changed after they took down Fisk. The firm was mentioned in the papers; they gave statements to TV news. Their do-gooder MO became common knowledge; Rosalind called him for the first time in five years and asked to talk in person. Foggy could think of a very few things that could mean, and none of them was good. He made sure that his affairs were in order: utilities, rent, will. Evidence of his connection to the mob in plain sight for any investigators who might have cause to visit a recently-vacated apartment. 

The ultimatum he received was so much worse than the one he prepared for.

“ _Franklin,” she had greeted, cold and distant as ever behind her desk and her bodyguards. “I had hoped that you were smart enough to correct this situation on your own so that I wouldn’t have to waste my time. Perhaps I would save more time by anticipating disappointment._ ”

Foggy was an adult now, a lawyer trained to dissect and twist words to his own advantage. He now recognized her manipulations for what they were, was entirely capable of seeing through her demeanor. Her disapproval had stung nonetheless.

“ _I’ll be brief. This situation with the Syndicate has made your misguided attempts at going straight impossible to ignore. You’ve clearly shown yourself to be incapable of keeping the Family’s needs in mind when you’re around that Murdock boy,” she said, uttering Matt’s name like an expletive. “He distracts you and confuses your priorities, just like he always has. This situation cannot be allowed to continue._

 _“I am willing to offer you two options. The first is to take matters into your own hands. If you can convince him to leave the city by the end of the week, then I’ll forget all about little Matthew Murdock, and you can start doing the job we sent you to school for. If he’s still here past Sunday,_ ” _she continued, the afternoon light glancing off her coal-black eyes,_ “ _then we’ll have to handle matters ourselves. I can promise you, if you choose the second option, then he’ll never see Tuesday_.”

If it were anyone else talking, if any other criminal had said something like that to Foggy, then he would never have hesitated to just tell Matt. He would have warned him of the danger and then stood aside to let him handle himself against the assassins. He would have known that, with enough warning, Daredevil could handle whatever they might throw at him. But Foggy knew that this Family, _his_ Family, had assassins that neither Matt nor Daredevil was prepared to deal with.

He knew because, twenty years ago, he had been one.

He slid the final piece of the reassembled gun into place, breathed in the bracing scents of gunmetal and death. _Convince him to leave the city_. For most people, the prospect of convincing Matt Murdock, the Daredevil himself, to leave Hell’s Kitchen would seem an insurmountable challenge. But Foggy knew exactly what to say. He had always known, ever since Matt came roaring back into his life that first day in undergrad, precisely what it would take for him to make Matt leave and never come back. 

He had rehearsed this conversation a thousand times, a thousand ways, the scenario shifting constantly to reflect the varied entailments of their conjoined lives, but the basic content, the core of the matter, always remained constant. And every scenario, _every single one_ , ended with Matt leaving. Since finding out about Daredevil, Foggy had also begun to have difficulty imagining a scenario in which Matt wouldn’t kill Foggy on his way out. Most nights, that prospect terrified him into sleepless, silent distress.

Tonight? He was planning on it.

The roof-access door opened quietly, and Foggy’s mind slipped into high gear. 

Daredevil stalked down the stairs. He was limping slightly, but no more than usual. That was good—Foggy needed him to be all there tonight.

“Foggy?” he asked upon reaching the foot of the stairs. “What’s wrong?” He tilted his head, no doubt scenting the metallic air. “And why do you have a gun?”

“Matt,” Foggy replied, “I haven’t been being entirely honest with you. I think that we should talk.”

Matt hesitated a moment, clearly unnerved. Then he slinked over to the couch opposite Foggy’s chair, sitting down tense on its edge. 

Foggy took a deep breath, squared his jaw—and sighed. “For God’s sake, take off that mask. I need to talk to _you_ , Matt, not him.”

Matt apologized and dutifully slipped off his cowl. Uncovered, his face telegraphed his emotions, clear as day in the eerie half-light: unease, confusion, curiosity. Fear. 

Maybe it would have been better if he’d kept the mask on.

Foggy breathed in again, and started talking before he could lose his nerve. “I’ve told you before that my mother wanted me to be a butcher. That was the truth. But you’ve never met my mother, so you couldn’t possibly have understood what she actually meant when she said that.” Foggy could already feel cold sweat beading on his back, and this was the least of the things he had to say tonight. He anchored himself on the gun in his hand, squeezing the handle with bruising force, and plunged onwards. “My mother’s name is Rosalind—Rosalind Sharpe.”

Matt inhaled sharply. “You’re—you’re with the Irish? The mob?”

Foggy’s mouth twisted ruefully. “Born and raised. When your mom’s the woman who runs half of the operation, it’s hard to avoid getting sucked into the family business. My older siblings were groomed for management positions, off the street, as safe as you can get in this business. But me? My mom wanted me to be a butcher.” The gun in his hand was warm. “An assassin.”

He heard Matt shift on the couch, but he kept his eyes trained out the window, watching a cherry blossom infinitely travel its looping path down the side of the neighboring building. “They—they have a particular way of training butchers. They always start them young: young enough that they don’t attract attention from the police, and young enough that they don’t know the meaning of what they’re doing.” Foggy turns the gun over in his hands. “I was eight when I shot a gun for the first time. I was nine the first time I killed a man.” _And, thank God, the last._

“Oh God, _Foggy_ —“

“I’m not finished,” Foggy interrupted him. He was only halfway there; he couldn’t afford to stop now. “I didn’t understand what he had done—they explained it to me, but all I made out was that he didn’t do what he was told, and that what I was going to do to him was what happened when people don’t do as they’re told. I didn’t need any more than that, really. He never saw it coming until I had the gun in his face. He had just enough time for the fear to come into his eyes. Or maybe he knew it was coming, and the fear had been there long before I was. Either way, that fear was all I saw in his eyes when they closed.” Foggy paused and considered his next words. This was the most important part, the one that would seal his fate and Matt’s: the execution was paramount. “It wasn’t until his kid showed up that I started to realize what I had done. That I had taken away a life. A person.” He swallowed. “Someone’s father.” 

“Foggy…” Matt’s voice said, thick with tears.

Foggy could feel tears gathering behind his own eyelids now. “The kid was my age—“

“Foggy, _please_ , don’t—“

“—and blind.”

Foggy didn’t need supersenses to hear Matt’s breathing stop. Reflexively, he glanced over at his friend, hunched over and shaking with his hands over his ears, as though he could block out the words, or the heartbeat that confirmed the truth of them.

When Matt finally drew in another shuddering breath, Foggy tore his eyes away and continued. “Normally, these days, you would kill any kids old enough to hold a grudge, especially boys. But things were different back then, and since the kid was blind, nobody thought anything of letting him go.” With the worst of it over, Foggy suddenly began to feel weightless, giddy, like he was in a free-fall. He giggled as a tear slipped down his cheek. “I guess the joke’s on them now, huh?”

Matt’s voice, shaky and gravelly with rage: “You—you _told_ —?”

In his elated state of mind, high on the anticipation of incipient death, Foggy understood what Matt was asking: _You told them about Daredevil?_ Foggy had done nothing of the sort, could _never_ do that to Matt—but anything that could make Matt fear for his safety, that could drive him out of the city, was something worth letting Matt believe. In the months since he found out about Matt’s abilities, Foggy had become adept at circumventing his lie-detecting abilities with half-truths and half-answers. This would be his final test of those skills. “Told what?” he asked, excited, jumping to his feet. “That you’re the masked menace that’s been terrorizing them for months? That you’re the one who’s been singlehandedly dismantling their operation piece by piece?” He laughed. “You should have known better than to mess with us, Matt.”

He was already well past the point of no return; all that was left was to twist the knife until he pushed Matt over that point, too. And for that, he had to be able to watch Matt’s reactions. He focused the full weight of his tear-soaked gaze on the man on the couch in front of him. He had hunched over even further now, curling into himself as his muscles coiled tighter and tighter with the anger that had to be inundating his system. That was good—Foggy could work with that.

“Did—“ Matt began. “Did you—were we—was any of it—was it real?”

Foggy’s heart was pounding faster than he had ever felt it before; the room around him seemed to glow, incandescent in the light of revelation. If he had been any less elated, any less ecstatic, Matt would surely have been able to hear his stomach clench and then drop when that garbled plea finally made sense of itself. _Does he really think that I could do something that cruel? That I could fake a friendship like this one just to keep tabs on a potential threat?_

Half-truths and half-answers. Let him think anything that might push him over the edge. “I’ve been lying to you for _years_ , Murdock,” Foggy said coldly. “Don’t make me start being honest now.”

Foggy watched the shudder pass through Matt’s spine, saw the instant in which his muscles recoiled, sending him jolting upwards and stumbling for the door. “I—I need to get out—”

“Stop right there!” Foggy said, finally raising the gun he’d brought, cocking it, pointing it right at Matt. “The only way you’re leaving here tonight is over my dead body.”

When he heard the shouted command, Matt froze; when he heard the gun’s safety click off, when he sensed that it was pointed at him, Matt’s face crumbled, his tears collecting in the anguished lines of his face like pools on the face of a cliff. “Foggy, _please_ , you don’t want to do this—“

 _Provoke him_ , Foggy’s racing heart screamed at him. _You’re so close to ending it. Just push him a little further, and this can all be over_. “Come on, Matt. I already killed one Murdock. It’d be nothing for me to take down one more.”

Matt’s eyes closed in anguish, and Foggy braced himself for the storm of fury that he had made of Matthew Murdock. But moments passed—minutes, hours, Foggy was in no place to say—and Matt made no move towards him. 

Did he need further prompting? “Just give me a reason, Murdock,” he said. “Come at me, I _dare_ you—“

“You’re bluffing.”

Foggy’s stomach lurched. “ _What_?”

“You’re bluffing. You’re not going to shoot.”

This wasn’t right. “Do I sound like I was fucking lying?” Matt’s jaw clenched. “You’re in denial, Murdock. The truth isn’t always what you wish you could be hearing.”

“I know that!” Matt shouted. “But I know _you_. I _know_ you. I know that you wouldn’t do this to me. Not unless someone put you up to it.”

Foggy swallowed. “You think you know me? What the _fuck_ do you know about Foggy Nelson?” He checked the sightline of the gun, adjusted his aim. “You do not want to test me, Murdock.”

“But I do,” Matt said. Finally, he started advancing on Foggy, but slowly and with his hands up—nonaggressive. Foggy took a step back, steadied the gun that had begun to shake in his hands. Three feet away from Foggy’s face, not two inches from the barrel of the gun, he came to a stop. “If it’s true—if you never felt anything for me, if what we had was really nothing but a—a game—then go ahead,” he said, placing his hands over Foggy’s on the gun. “Shoot me,” he offered, raising the gun until the barrel rested against his own forehead. “Believe me, at this point, you would be doing me a favor.” He closed his eyes against his flowing tears and waited.

Foggy felt like the air had been knocked out of him. _This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen_. Foggy was never supposed to get a chance to use the gun: Matt was supposed to knock it out of his hands on the way to claiming the life of his father’s murderer. He wasn’t supposed to call Foggy’s bluff. The truth was that he couldn’t kill Matt any more than he could sit by and let Matt be killed. But if he showed weakness, if he let Matt talk him down, then everything would be wasted. 

_This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen_.

Foggy gritted his teeth. “I killed your father.”

“You didn’t know what you were doing.”

“I’m a murderer!”

“You were a _child_.”

Foggy’s breath caught in his throat. He tasted tears on his lips. “ _Fuck_ ,” he said, engaging the safety on the pistol and drawing it away. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.”

Matt opened his eyes as he released his grip on Foggy’s hands and the gun. His gaze shone in the light of the billboard, the depths of his sorrow highlighted by fluorescent white and hazel. “What do you mean? How was—how was _this_ supposed to go?”

“You’re supposed to hate me,” Foggy said, sinking to his knees, letting the barrel of the gun clatter against the floor. “You’re supposed to leave. You’re supposed to punish me.”

Matt’s silent above him, his pain visible in his defeated stance, audible in the uneven patterns of his breathing. “Is that what you want?” he asked. “To be punished?”

Foggy looked up to him. Was he offering? Was there still a chance to salvage it? “Yes. Yes, please. Matt, please,” he said, taking Matt’s hand and slipping the gun into it. “Please,” he said, holding his hands behind his back and lowering his head like a sacrificial victim. “Please,” he said, closing his eyes, “Please, just do it.”

He heard Matt sigh above him, a weary sound that made Foggy’s heard keen. “Okay.”

Foggy crouched, waiting for death. The elation he had felt after revealing his secret hand burned down to ash in his chest, but there were still slivers of that contentment to be found. _No more secrets. No more pain. No more disappointment._

He jumped when he heard a metallic click, and looked towards the source of the sound. He saw Matt dismantling the gun, throwing the parts alternately down each end of the alley outside. Foggy swallowed, then returned to his penitential pose. Matt was right: he didn’t deserve a quick death. Matt had the right to kill him whatever way he saw fit, which apparently meant with his bare hands. Foggy’s breathing picked up as he heard Matt approach. _God, he hoped that Matt wouldn’t hate himself too much afterwards. He had already suffered enough because of Foggy._

Matt kneeled in front of him, putting himself at the same height as Foggy. Foggy tensed as he felt Matt’s arms reaching towards his neck, and then started when he found himself pulled up against Matt’s chest. “Matt, what are you—“

“You don’t need to be punished, Foggy,” Matt said, his voice thick with emotion. “Nothing I could do would be worse than what you’ve already done to yourself.”

Foggy began to struggle against Matt’s hold, but Matt only adjusted his grip and pulled him closer. “Goddamn it! What the fuck are you doing, then?”

Foggy felt it more than saw it, the pained half-smile that Matt pressed against his ear. “I’m forgiving you.”

Foggy sobbed. “No. No!” he said, pushing against Matt’s grip, knowing all the while that it was hopeless. “Fuck you, you bastard! You fucking _coward_! Let me go!”

But Matt didn’t let him go, no matter how hard he struggled, no matter how much he shouted. Finally he gave in and collapsed, weeping, into his friend’s arms. He listened to the sounds of their heartbeats, felt Matt’s arm drawing soothing patterns over his back, and heard to the quiet whisper of Matt’s stuttering, tearstained voice:

_“Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed by Thy name…”_

This was the third time in his life that Foggy Nelson was saved by Matthew Murdock.

_“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven…”_

The first time, Foggy watched a lost little kid crying over his father and swore that he would never be the cause of something like that ever again.

_“Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we for—forgive those who t-trespass against us…”_

The second time, Foggy let an idealistic law student pull him away from his Family’s side of the law and towards the path of justice and righteousness.

_“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from Evil.”_

The third time, Foggy began to be forgiven.

_“Amen.”_


End file.
